TFG1MIKE 365 – 2019 Day 10 – 20th Anniversary of Batman Beyond!

Hello all and welcome to a NEW Daily Blog series from me… TFG1Mike! The idea here is for me to write something, anything, once a day for 365 days. From January 1, 2019 to December 31, 2019. In my 10th entry, I’ll be talking about the 20th Anniversary of Batman Beyond! A number of years ago now I ranked my Top 20 Favorite Batman Beyond episodes, you can find that HERE!

January 10, 1999 the debut of Batman Beyond on The WB… 20 Years Ago today…. I remember my exact reaction to the Opening title sequence, and the “Rebirth” 2 part pilot. My reaction was, “An Old Bruce Wayne…what SHOW IS THIS? WHEN did BTAS Bruce get old???” I only saw a handful of BTAS episodes between 1992 and 1995, I wasn’t allowed to watch it, because my then stepmother said it was too violent. So as a 19 year old, just out of High School, and attempting college… I was like, wait… what happened to the old show?

In the years since the show debuted… I still love it to this day. Everything about it is cool to me. Bruce Timm and his team did an amazing job. Thank you to him, Dan Riba, Paul Dini, and the rest of the crew for this show! Thank you to Will Friedle and Kevin Conroy, along with the rest of the voice cast for giving us such great performances! From the animation, to the stories, the characters, and the music! I have re watched the series multiple times since the DVDs were released, and my hope is that it gets a Blu Ray release like BTAS did. I love the comics that Adam Beechen, Kyle Higgins, and Dan Jurgens wrote or continue to write for Batman Beyond. As well as the artists such as Norm Breyfogle, Thony Silas, Dexter Soy, Phil Hester, Will Conrad, Bernard Chang, and many others. What Dan Jurgens has been doing on the writing since 2015, has been an absolute joy!

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What Batman Beyond did was build upon what was there, but also told a fresh story. There are so many elements of Terry McGinnis’s life, that match up with Bruce Wayne”s, but Terry is a completely different Batman. The story that the show told, I felt then, and still now now, was very interesting, and the look of the series was super cool. Neo Gotham looks bright and shiny on the surface, but you peel back the layers a bit, and it’s still that same old Gotham. The futuristic aspects of the show appealed to me then and now. Some of the subject matter that the episodes tackled was interesting. Take the “Payback” episode, that was all about kids in a group home. Well not all of it was just that, but the setting was a group home. Having been in 15 different placements as a ward of the State of Kentucky, back in the mid 90s, that episode spoke to me a bit. I loved how Terry had to go through the paces of learning to be Batman, at the same time being his own version of Batman. It’s tough to live up to Bruce Wayne’s legendary status! While the show was very villain of the week, the storytelling was very compelling. The creators set up villains that weren’t just Bruce Wayne-Batman rogues’ gallery updates. Terry was given his own set of villains to deal with, along with a completely different set of problems as well in his civilian life. Balancing being a teenager and Batman all at the same time, now that has to be tough! Nowadays I re watch my favorite episodes of the series. I can’t go without watching Rebirth, Shriek, Dead Man’s Hand, Lost Soul, Eggbaby, April Moon, Out of the Past, The Call, and so many others.

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We are in 2019 now, Bruce Timm has stated that Batman Beyond is 50 years in the future of whenever now is. However we know that there is an actual timeline to the series. I recently watched a YouTube video attempting to figure it all out, and now my brain hurts. My point in adding this at the end here is that 2039, the year the continuity supposedly starts, is not that far away in real life. Will we have futuristic cities, cars, and other stuff by then? Who knows!?! What are some of your memories of the Batman Beyond animated series? Do you, or have you been reading the comics? Let me know in the comments below!

Join me tomorrow morning January 11, 2019 as I’ll be writing about an incident in Wal-Mart that happened to me last year.

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